E.B.E.
"E.B.E." is the seventeenth episode of the first season of The X-Files. Synopsis After a downed UFO crashes near Iraqi airspace, Mulder and Scully follow an unmarked truck carrying the UFO's occupant. Summary Teaser Above Iraq, a jet pilot notices a small disc of light that does not appear on his radar but moves erratically out of his line of sight. The Iraqi pilot contacts his base and requests identification of the object 25 miles away from him. However, the base personnel do not detect the object on their radar system and ask the pilot to confirm the object's bearings. When he looks for the object, the pilot cannot see it anywhere but mumbles that he did a second ago. Suddenly, a bright light illuminates his cockpit as the noise of an engine whizzes past him. The base personnel report that he is under attack moments before the object passes him again. The pilot attains a target lock on the object and fires a missile at it, causing it to erupt in a massive fireball. The pilot reports that he has hit the object. In a NATO surveillance station on the Turkey/Iraq border in Hakkari, Turkey, soldiers sleeping in bunks hear a noise like an airplane falling as the light in the room momentarily darkens. When the soldiers hear a loud explosion outside, they rush to their feet. They hurry to look out a window to see a fiery explosion in a nearby wooded area. One soldier uses a radio to contact Red Crescent and reports a downed plane near the camp perimeter, but a man's voice answers that Red Crescent is not currently detecting anything in the sky near the surveillance station. The soldier confirms the sighting and suggests that Red Crescent have a medivac unit standing by before he announces that the soldiers are about to investigate the explosion. They leave the surveillance station as Red Crescent contacts Medivac One and reports the incident. Meanwhile, another small disc of light flies over the area and hovers above the crash site. Act One An exhausted truck driver (Ranheim) enters an area of hightened UFO activity in Tennessee only to experience a power outage on his vehicle. He gets out and fires upon a large silhouette, then reports this, strange lights and a cigar-shaped, black object in the sky to Lexington Police. Lexington Police briefly detain him on the charge of firing a weapon on a county road. Mulder and Scully rush to the incident scene. Scully suggests that because of the long hours worked by the driver and the presence of a marsh nearby the entire incident was a mixture of tiredness, delirium and Swamp Gas and not worthy of investigation. Mulder however detects radiation levels 5 times higher than background and crudely measures a slight temporal lag, the multiple sightings that night lead him to seek an interview with Ranheim. At Lexington Police station, they interview an exhausted Ranheim who now reports orange and green lights in the sky and saucer shaped craft, contrary to his previous report. He now seems disinterested in telling his story and wants simply to leave. Since the incident the previous night, he has developed a cough, a fever and a rash. He admits to being an army veteran but claims never to have been in the Gulf when Scully suggests Gulf War Syndrome as a possible cause for his sudden illness. Police Chief Rivers releases Ranheim and sends Mulder and Scully on their way, wanting nothing to do with the case. Later, at the Rent-A-Car office, Mulder suggests to Scully that someone had rattled Chief Rivers and that Ranheim was hiding something; at that same moment a woman in the office asks to borrow Scully's pen for a moment. Mulder speculates that heightened UFO activity may be linked to Gulf War Syndrome as soldiers report many UFOs during war-time and seeks "expert" advice. Mulder takes Scully to meet the Lone Gunmen for the first time. After listening dubiously to conversations regarding the Kennedy assassination, the true nature of the CIA, and the real reasons for the magnetic stripes inside dollar bills they discuss Gulf War Syndromeand brand some of Mulder's ideas on the subject to be even wilder than their own. Back at FBI Headquarters, Scully discovers that the pen she lent out earlier at the Rent-A-Car office is bugged. Act Two Mulder meets with Deep Throat, who passes him an envelope containing intercepted transmissions from Iraqi fighter jets who shot down a UFO four days before. As he leaves, Deep Throat tells Mulder he is on "a dangerous path". Scully discovers that the weight in the manifest does not match the records from three weigh-stations along the truck's route and that Ranheim's real name is Frank Druce, a member of Army Special Operations who did serve in Mosul, Iraq. Mulder hypothesizes that Druce was hired to escort the wreckage of a UFO and possibly an occupant to a laboratory in the United States using the unmarked truck. Mulder and Scully decide to intercept the truck as it heads towards Colorado. When Mulder returns home to collect some clothes for the trip, he discovers Deep Throat waiting for him in his house with the apartment's mains power switched off. Deep Throat gives Mulder another document containing a photo taken at Fort Benning, Georgia where 17 UFOs were reported in a single hour, perhaps searching for the wreckage and occupant. As usual, Deep Throat dodges a direct question from Mulder and leaves him with more questions than answers. Mulder falls for the photographic bait offered by Deep Throat and declares they should go immediately to Fort Benning. Scully examines the photo objectively and spots some minor lighting inconsistencies that reveal it to be a fake. After additional analysis by the experts at the FBI, Mulder realises they have been deceived by Deep Throat; a source Mulder had trusted completely. Act Three When Mulder confronts Deep Throat about his deception, Deep Throat explains that there are some things Mulder should not know, that he needed to throw him off the trail and that "a lie is most convincingly hidden between two truths". He denies responsibility for surveillance of Scully but reveals that Mulder is being bugged, a fact later confirmed when Mulder discovers a bug hidden within the plug socket in his apartment. Upon arriving at McCarran Airport, Las Vegas, Nevada, Mulder and Scully make further inquiries using public telephones to avoid their calls being traced and eavesdropped. They discover that the truck is heading west and hop on a flight to Seattle. They follow the truck for hours then suddenly witness a bright light. The truck has stopped and Ranheim is missing. They open the truck and find, behind several boxes of auto-parts, a makeshift medical ward with a restraining stretcher and monitoring equipment. It is now empty, leading Mulder to believe that they were witness to a rescue mission. Act Four The lack of empirical evidence, the normal levels of radiation and zero temporal lag lead Mulder to conclude that it was a trick to further throw them off the scent. Mulder liases with friends at various UFO hotlines and discovers that the frequent sightings that followed the route of the truck have continued in the victinity of Mattawa, Washington - around 100 miles from where the truck stopped. The two venture to Mattawa, where UFO party-goers tell them that UFOs have been known to hover over the Hanford Power Plant. Mulder and Scully observe Ranheim exiting the power plant and use Langly at Lone Gunmen's expertise at hacking security systems to gain access to the facility. Mulder and Scully are apprehended inside the facility. Mulder escapes custody and heads for the only area Langly could not get them access to; Level 6. Level 6 appears to be an area for high voltage research and a plethora of industrial electrical equipment is arranged around a quarantine cell. Mulder is quickly apprehended by armed guards, who are then dismissed by Deep Throat. Deep Throat informs Mulder that the creature is dead; exterminated moments before by the government. He adds that this is standard international procedure and that he once carried out such an extermination himself during the Vietnam War. Deep Throat reveals that the innocent and blank expression on the creature's face as he killed it haunts him to this day; this is why he comes to Mulder, so that one day the truth might be known. As Mulder and Deep Throat separate, Scully rejoins her partner and the two are left wondering "which lie to believe". Background Information *This episode features the first appearance of the Lone Gunmen. Their characters were based on a trio of men whom producer Glen Morgan saw in June 1993 (shortly before he and James Wong began writing for The X-Files), at a UFO convention in Los Angeles which he attended with Marilyn Osborn, the writer of the later Season 1 episode "Shapes". According to Morgan, the three men were sitting at a table, pushing "a mixed bag of paranoia. They started telling people about the magnetic strips in twenty-dollar bills, and in no time there were a half-dozen people tearing up ten- and twenty-dollar bills." Even the way the men were dressed would prove inspirational to the creation of the Lone Gunmen. *Langly, Frohike and Byers were initially added to the episode to provide light-hearted comic relief. Morgan was unhappy with the result, however, feeling that he and his writing partner had made a mistake in executing the concept of the Lone Gunmen. As Morgan later recalled, "We had kind of written them off", until the producers became aware that fans on the internet were responding favorably to the characters. The response prompted a return appearance of the Lone Gunmen in Season 2, namely in the episode "Blood", and eventually a recurring role on the series as well as their own spin-off series, years later. *They didn't know that the Lone Gunmen would become popular and thought this would be their only appearance, thus why assistant director Tom Braidwood ended up portraying Frohike since it was thought to be a one shot deal. He only had one line after all. (Audio commentary from Bond, Jimmy Bond) *Tom Braidwood told the story of how he got the job to be Frohike to many over the years and Vince Gilligan recounted the story on the Lone Gunmen commentary: Episode director William Graham, writer Glen Morgan, and writer James Wong were discussing the Lone Gunmen and how they hadn't found anyone to play the Frohike character. Tom Braidwood came by asking about a shooting schedule and one of them said, "We need someone sleezy, like Braidwood." So they ended up using Braidwood. (Audio commentary from Jump the Shark) *When Mulder and Scully enter the Hanford power plant using aliases, Mulder says his name is Tom Braidwood and Scully uses the name Val Stefoff. In reality, both Tom Braidwood and Vladimir Stefoff were First Assistant Directors of The X-Files, with Braidwood additionally appearing as Melvin Frohike, a role he first portrayed in this episode. *This is the first of only two episodes in Season 1 that feature scenes set in both Mulder and Scully's apartments, the second episode being "The Erlenmeyer Flask". Nitpicks *During the first truck scenes, it is clearly the middle of the night and the time is stated as 12:20 AM, except when the police cars pass the truck at 03:30, it is daylight. *At 29:37 on the DVD you can see a large snow-capped mountain in the distance, even though Mulder is supposed to be driving through D.C. towards the Baltimore airport. *At 30:51 on the DVD when Scully is looking through binoculars in the car in the background, she (and her window) are clearly on a green screen because they contain interference. Cast Main Cast *David Duchovny as Special Agent Fox Mulder *Gillian Anderson as Special Agent Dana Scully Guest Starring *Jerry Hardin as Deep Throat Co-Starring *Allan Lysell as Chief Rivers *Peter LaCroix as Frank Druce *Bruce Harwood as John Fitzgerald Byers *Dean Haglund as Richard Langly *Tom Braidwood as Melvin Frohike References Category:X-Files episodes